Larian is a studio that has had something of a meteoric rise; in the sense that they have gone so far, not that they've been rapidly granted success they haven't worked for. Because Larian have worked for it, bitterly and long from the beginning top-down RPG gameplay of Divine Divinity to the action adventure stylings of Divinity 2 and the strategy virtual novel game 'Dragon Commander' before finally nailing their style with the CPRG legend: Original Sin. That last couple of games were, of course, the slam dunks that won the team the dream contract of developing Baldur's Gate 3 which they have done with a unique attention to the source material which makes me so gosh-darn glad that these are the guys working on the game. Could you imagine how dry Baldur's Gate 3 would be if WoTC bought back modern Bioware to make it? I shudder to even ratify that thought with a serious contemplation.
But in their journey towards the CRPG genius that was Original Sin, Larian did take the short detour into more accessible action RPGs like the rest of the industry did. And the result? Well that would be 'Divinity 2: Ego Draconis' and it's second part 'Flames of Vengeance'. Now as is the case whenever a big studio lives long enough in the spotlight, the modern fame has attracted new eyes to rock up to the devs and analyse them, usually even going back and assessing their past catalogue to see if their modern success story was ever hinted at in the games that came before. Video game archaeologists with a shotgun approach to digging out any old game that still functions and immediately declaring it an unsung classic of it's age. Well, although I did not have the chance to follow this trend, I did actually get around to playing all the Divinity games around about the time that Original Sin was coming out. (With the exception of Beyond Divinity because I hated that game so much it made me quit after the first act.) So lacking the rose-tint of a dumpster diver; what can I really say about the Divinity 2 game that treats it honestly?
My god was it average. In all the best and worst ways. Whereas so many fantasy RPGs of the age were falling into dime a dozen heap in an attempt to emulate the greats of Oblivion and... well, Oblivion; Divinity was taking it's inspiration from Oblivion and... making it worse in an attempt to do something different. Look Larian had ambition, and if I tell you that this was a game where you balanced fantasy adventuring with regularly transforming into a fire breathing dragon then you're going to imagine something incredible, right? Well hold your nose for that cold water because Divinity 2 was one of those titles that was a tad too ambitious for it's own good. And yet, even then the game isn't a total dumpster fire like most 'too ambitious' projects are. It sort of hovers in this nebulous space of a game that I wouldn't ward you away from like it's the plague, but also one I don't really have any reason to recommend either. Like a double edged dagger, my critics balance themselves.
For positives I think that Divinity 2 has a simply great music scape, one that can almost trick you into thinking you're playing a more epic game than you really are. And that disparity is probably best bought up in the combat which is an open-action no-turns affair without stopping for tactics or any of that noise, and an ever present adjustable ability bar akin to an MMO or CRPG that becomes a little cumbersome to navigate in real-time action combat scenarios. (Unless you memorise your favourite moves and just tap the corresponding hotkey, of course.) The narrative shirks the stuffiness and over-seriousness that plagued some of the most boring fantasy RPGs of that generation, unfortunately Larian's humour is still eye-scratchingly dry by the development of 'Ego Draconis'. ('Flames of Vengeance' actually marked the first time Larian started to swing more hits than misses in their scripts.) It's like I said, every positive has an equally balanced negative.
Divinity 2, which is strangely the third game in the Divinity series, is a linear action adventurer game with pretty weak combat that is justified through the veneer of RPG slapped ontop of it. Enemies are lock on and slap-to-death affairs and most fights end up being no more skillful than 'make sure you have more health before you start so that you can win' affairs. Dragon sections, and you can only dragon-out in very specific areas, are a bit more dynamic and free-reign, but they suffer from a monotony that the game maintains throughout it's design for it's first half and fires into turbo mode for it's second half. Every dragon section is defined by turrets and air-mines that you have to blow up methodically and boringly. Most of the time you'll be ducking out of the action to wait for abilities to recharge, and most of the largest 'explorable' places you get to check out are literally copy and past challenge towers. Not the most inspired of design choices. In fact, every dungeon space in the whole game stretches on far too long without any significant visual disparity to keep the eye from getting bored, and are populated full of mindless hit sponge enemies that you'll end up groaning at everytime you see a group of them.
In fact, the entire world design of Ego Draconis seems cursed from probably being a linear set-up that was wrung together out of a proposed open world, which I think took hints from Oblivion. Not least of all because this game has it's own version of Oblivion gates, only so much worse because they are forced Dragon high-level sections set out across giant floating islands that are entirely flat to walk across aside from randomly scattered enemy patrols who litter it. Larian hide their indie status very well given the sheer quality of their craftmenship in most cases, but Divinity 2 was them at their most 'experimental'. Which is to say the game's garish design decisions stuck out like a sore beaten thumb. 'Flames of Vengeance', by the very nature of being much more linear, has a better time feeling like a professional product throughout, but not enough where I could consider the game a classic of today or of it's time.
And yet I would not call the package an awful game. Actually the fact the whole thing is standable is despite it's flailing rather than because of them. The raw beats of the story are fine, not great or good but merely fine. The environments are... actually rather ugly but ambitious. Larian tried to cover a lot of ground and it really did not work out for them, especially for some of their more open locations in the game. I despise some of the creature design, mainly their utterly bizarre goblins, and find the Dragon form to be more cumbersome than empowering. Seriously, you're more like a flying blimp than a soaring being of destructive might. To be absolutely honest, I do not know if I would have made it through the entire game if I hadn't had Original Sin waiting for me on the otherside. (And thank god I did. That masterpiece was a perfect palette cleanser.)
So was Divinity 2 some lost gem of the 2000's that we turn our noses up at unwittingly? No! Duh, have you been reading this thing? It's a largely mediocre game propped up by slight flashes of potential and the odd good joke in the second half. It's not particularly fun, nor memorable outside of it's soundtrack; and in fact I'd honest recommend Divine Divinity over this one for holding some great piece of early Larian charm in it's construction. As they sit now, Larian are an incredible RPG developer who are currently iterating on some of the most robust gameplay systems in all of CRPGs, without exaggeration. Divinity 2 was a stepping stone on that journey, no doubt; but in all honesty if we were to compare that place with where they are now, it would look like a pit in the road rather than a shining milestone.
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